Contact improvisation, the non-eroticized touch in an ‘art-sport’

Abstract

This article is from the first chapter of a Ph.D. thesis and introduces some pivotal experiences and emerging beliefs that inspired the past two decades of professional practice, incorporating contact improvisation (CI), Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) and Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP). The purpose of this article is to indicate the epistemology of my professional self, a touch specialist, presented in three emerging roles: the CI practitioner/teacher, the BMC practitioner/teacher and the DMP practitioner/teacher. Through the practice of CI and BMC I learnt essential touch and movement skills, and sharing them with deafblind people had an unexpected outcome – I discovered the effects of touch deprivation. In working with people who experience social exclusion in the context of socially inclusive arts projects I learnt that I too had been deprived of the universal language of touch. My personal and professional paths became intertwined as I undertook to work with touch-based methods in health contexts and encountered the dilemma of working in a non-touch culture and the negative effects on patients. CI and BMC combine as effective methods within DMP practice as they operate within the territory of humanistic and body-oriented psychotherapy and enrich this with specialist skills including reflexivity, hermeneutics and self-enquiry.

Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste, and Gender

“…Sociology and cultural studies have identified touch as a vital medium of human communication, while also acknowledging it as a strictly regulated behavior governed by culturally specific norms (Manning 2007; Guru 2017; Sarukkai 2009; Classen 2005). Scholarship on the use of CI within movement therapy, as a mode of rehabilitation within community practices, also echoes its healing and generative properties (Houston 2009; Dymoke 2014). However, although its healing, generative, and connective properties have been celebrated in dance studies, there is still an unmet need to identify and examine choreographic touch, especially as it shapes CI, as a discriminatory practice, through the intersectional lenses of race, caste, and gender politics.…”

Touching the untouchables

“…More crucially, I observed the lack of physical contact with others (Dymoke, ; Paxton & Kilcoyne, ). When provided with an opportunity to move with others, using contact improvisation and physical theatre techniques, unsurprisingly these issues were addressed (Dymoke, , ). In touring with deaf blind, deaf and disabled performers we embodied the potential for inclusion in the arts and society, each one of us experiencing a subjective and communal sense of breaking with taboo and the conceived norm.…”

“…I recall the unconscious/conscious dialogues in our embodied therapeutic relationship, referred to above; in touching me Sarah is being touched deeply. Like a membrane her touch is a locus of meeting self and other—a membrane for communication, for an expression of a desire for support and a means to sense and feel herself in relationship to another (Dymoke, , ). At this place she is able to sense her corporeality as a unity, contained and enlivened.…”

Organización de los erotismos en la danza contemporánea independiente en el Valle de Paravachasca (Córdoba, Argentina)

“…Reconociendo que la cultura sexual es performada de forma heterogénea de acuerdo con las particularidades interseccionales de clase, raza/etnicidad, género, edad, religión, etc., las sexualidades se configuran como un "archipiélago extendido y difuso de modos erráticos de encuentro, negociación y disfrute" (Elizalde y Felitti, 2015: 10), en tanto experimentos sociales cotidianos (Giddens, 1998). Es así como en numerosas prácticas artísticas encontramos configuraciones particulares de las sexualidades y los erotismos, como sucede en la danza contact improvisación (Dymoke, 2014;Sciurano, Martínez Albanesi y Nardacchione, 2021) y los clubs electrónicos (Blázquez, 2012;Lenarduzzi, 2012Lenarduzzi, y 2014, donde se performan políticas sexuales particulares.…”

“…La mayoría de los estudios consultados relacionan el erotismo a la sexualidad (Bianciotti, 2015;Carozzi, 2015;Dymoke, 2014;Hanna, 2010;Liska, 2018;Markowitz, 2003;Vionnet, 2020), y solo en algunos casos lo vinculan a la fuerza creativa (Esteban, 2020) y/o a la intensidad vital y sensorial (Esteban, 2020;Lenarduzzi, 2012Lenarduzzi, y 2014. Respecto de esta última forma de organización del erotismo, Lenarduzzi (2012 y 2014) propone el concepto de pista de baile pos-sexual para analizar el mundo de la música electrónica de Buenos Aires, donde se presenta una erótica ampliada, "una suerte de «amor oceánico» que nos invade quizá tanto como el «enamoramiento» […] pero su «erotismo» no es específicamente sexual" (Lenarduzzi, 2012: 273).…”